Chen and Sriraman Receive Inaugural Google Award

Beidi Chen and Akshitha Sriraman, assistant professors of electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, are inaugural recipients of a new award from Google for machine learning and systems pioneers in academia. The Google ML and Systems Junior Faculty Award recognizes professors who are leading the analysis, design, and implementation of efficient, scalable, secure, and trustworthy computing systems.

“Their work crosses the technology stack, from algorithms to software and hardware, enabling machine learning and cloud computing at an increasingly massive scale,” said Amin Vahdat, Vice President for the Machine Learning, Systems, and Cloud AI team at Google, in his announcement. “The recipients, who were selected by a distinguished group of Google engineers and researchers, will receive grants of $100,000 in unrestricted funding.”

Chen’s research primarily focuses on efficient machine learning. She designs and optimizes algorithms and models on modern hardware to accelerate large machine learning systems. Her work has won a best paper runner-up at ICML 2022, a best paper award at IISA 2018, and a best paper award at USENIX LISA 2014. She was selected as a Rising Star in EECS by MIT in 2019 and UIUC in 2021.

Sriraman’s research bridges computer architecture and software systems, with a focus on making hyperscale data center systems more efficient, sustainable, and impartial via solutions that span the systems stack. Her work has developed the software and hardware foundations of hyperscale data center systems that support modern web services, such as web search, video streaming, and online healthcare. Her solutions have been deployed on real hyperscale systems and serve billions of users, saving millions of dollars and meaningfully reducing the global carbon footprint. In addition to this Google award, Sriraman’s research has been awarded an NSF CAREER Award, the 2024 George Tallman Ladd Research Award, the 2023 Intel Rising Star Award, the 2022 ACM SIGARCH/TCCA Outstanding Dissertation Award Honorable Mention, the 2022 ACM SIGOPS Dennis M. Ritchie Doctoral Dissertation Award Honorable Mention, the 2022 BenchCouncil Doctoral Dissertation Award, the 2021 David J. Kuck Dissertation Prize, the 2021 ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Award, a Meta Systems Research Award, and two IEEE Micro Top Picks distinctions. She was named a 2019 Rising Star in EECS.

“I am extremely honored to be one of the first recipients of this Google award,” says Sriraman. “I’m excited about potential future collaborations with Google. This award will support my group’s research on radically redesigning the data center systems stack to be more sustainable and impartial. I’m deeply grateful to Google for recognizing the value of this important line of research and enabling it.”